Respectfully Engaging Animism

But that was our first introduction. The leading elder was also a shaman who traced his ancestry back to a certain devil and he described certain sicknesses as being yellow or if someone got sick, he would chew on a certain leaf and sit under a certain tree that was enchanted, that would make your body go numb if you went near it. And he would divine why you got sick. And so these were – it was very common for – one of the church leaders was in charge of making the tarot, which is like a starchy potato. They would send him off for six months to do the magic to make the tarot grow, but he was also an elder in the church. And so there was no sense that this was peculiar or non Christian because if I had said don’t do magic, don’t trust an evil spirit, they would agree entirely because doing the rain stone isn’t magic for them. It was just a law of nature. This stone, everything in the earth is created by God. The stone was created by God. Therefore in some syllogism, God must’ve created this stone. The stone makes rain. God gave us the rain stones and so we’re actually fulfilling our Genesis 2:15 commandment to be fruitful and multiply by making rain, making tarots grow, healing our kids through chewing on leaves.

But where we were, we had told them we’re here to learn your culture. We wanna live with you and so we actually had people knocking on our door in the morning to wake us up and say hey, you gotta come see this dance we’re doing. We’re gonna make it rain or as a matter of fact, one time, they said we’re gonna make the sun shine. We wanna borrow your truck and so don’t look at the wood and don’t touch the wood because it’s holy, but just back your truck up to the tree and we’ll chop it down and cut it up in small pieces and put it in your truck, and you bring it back. That’s a good example of syncretism. You’ve got a modern day truck driving them and you’ve got the missionary driving the wood up into the village that you're gonna use to do some ritual to make the sun shine. A special someone who calls himself a descendant of the sun takes a certain sun stone, puts it in a basket, cooks it over this wood that they’ve cut down in a secret hut and makes the sun shine.

And right on the doors of the church are performing a variety of rituals. In some cases, some of the people will go in and participate in the activities of the church, and come out and do what they do. And in other cases, you’ve got people who don’t wanna have anything to do with the church ‘cause it’s been around a long time and they recognize that it’s a challenge to them and what they believe. Which brings us to the contrastive situation which is that in places where Christianity has come and in some cases established itself or begun to establish itself. The animistic community sometimes is reactive to the presence of the Christians.

And so they need these rituals to decrease the anxiety of the umbilical cord fell off. What if someone gets it? Bury it well. Burn it well. Do something magical or supernatural to avoid the law of contagion that someone might perform black magic on my child. And of course if your child dies, then everyone looks back and says what’d you do with the first tooth when it came? What’d you do with the umbilical cord? Did your wife go into hiding after the placenta came out? What’d you do with the placenta?

The other law is the law of imitation, which is that things that sound or look alike exert an influence on each other. If I make the sound of rain, it’ll rain. If I make something that looks like a coconut wet and healthy basically, smooth it all up, then my coconuts will be healthy. These rituals are – exist to decrease the anxiety about the spiritual nature of life or these laws. Beyond the first two, then a puberty ritual. That’s seen as a very dangerous period in life. Are you a man or a boy or how do you fit into society? And very anxiety producing and so we’ll put you in hiding until we know you're safe. You're no longer spiritually dangerous.

And funerals of course are the biggest example of when you die, we don’t know how long your spirit’s gonna hang around and taunt us. A funeral can last a month. You can't shave. You can't peel any potatoes or anything ‘cause you might cut yourself. You can't stay inside that person’s house. It might collapse on you and so animistic funerals can be very involved and burn everything related to that person. And don’t say their name ever again because we don’t know how long that spirit hangs around. Those are the rites of passage related to animism. There can be many more and then there's the rites of intensification, which are done as a – at a festival level community-wide, usually on an annual basis related – usually related to agriculture or the moon, for instance, throughout the world.

In western European history, we had Mayday, which was a spring fertility ritual. There's new moon rituals. Again, it’s fear about is it last month or this month? Is it a spiritually charged time? Where we live, there was a ritual every single night at sunset, which was seen as the most spiritually charged time of day because it was neither day nor night. Were the spirits out? Had they been – in the daytime, you would assume spirits wouldn’t be as active, I guess. Something in animistic logic would say that, but right at sunset and so that’s the time when you – every day, they would make an incantation to the spirits and get stoned on a pepper plant called kava and communicate to the spirits.

And the other – just an example of how that affects Christianity, let’s say that one man is the potato – is in charge of the potato magic. And he decides he’s gonna be a Christian and he's no longer going to do potato magic. That’s not his decision to make because he lives in a community of 250, 500, 1000 people that says if our potatoes don’t grow, it’s your fault. And they can be absolutely furious about that. He will be blamed then probably not just for a potato failure, but for every single accident that happens in the village. It’s ‘cause you weren't doing your part and so it really keeps the belief in these rituals tied to clan allegiances, keeps – perpetuates it. It’s very hard to break out of it or you are responsible for sickness, mudslides, deaths, and – yeah.

I imagine that was a challenge when you were – of course you were doing translation work, but still when you're trying to introduce people to why they should read a New Testament, we should explain that when you go to an island like you do with Wycliffe, the goal is you're helping them discover their language, write and codify it. And then turn around and try and translate, at least initially, a New Testament and ultimately I guess the goal is to put the Bible in that language. And we’re talking about societies often times where people, they don’t have dictionaries. They're starting from scratch. Why don’t you talk a little bit about how that works?